A FEMEN activist, with writings on her chest reading ‘Illegal Fascism National Shame,’ raises her fist as they disrupt a rally held to mark the anniversary of the death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, in Oriente Square, downtown Madrid, Spain, 18 November 2018. Spanish ruler Francisco Franco died on 20 November 1975. EPA-EFE/VICTOR LERENA

The Second Coming of Fascism?

Throughout 2018, analogies between today and the 1930s became alarmingly commonplace. Hortatory books such as former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s Fascism: A Warning and Yale University historian Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny are proliferating, and there certainly does seem to be a menacing odor of racism, violence, and despotic intrigue in the air.

In the United States, anti-Semites now march openly in the streets, and pipe bombs have targeted former President Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the financier George Soros, and eight other prominent people singled out for attack by President Donald Trump. In Germany, leaders of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) think that Germans should be “proud” of the Wehrmacht’s service in both world wars. In the United Kingdom, the right-wing thug Stephen Yaxley-Lennon has been canonized as an “English” martyr, and a supposedly reputable Sunday newspaper recently published talk of Tory Brexiteers “knifing” British Prime Minister Theresa May in the “killing zone.” The list goes on.

Moreover, insurgent populists are not just marching. They are organizing a pan-European movement in the run-up to the May 2019 EU parliamentary elections. Rivals to lead this effort include Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini. Its would-be coordinator, though, is Steve Bannon, the burly American agitator who, together with the obscure Belgian politician Mischaël Modrikamen, has formed “The Movement.”

Still, Bannon has had a mixed reception in nationalist and neo-fascist circles. As an American, he “has no place in a European political party,” complained Jérôme Rivière of France’s National Rally (formerly the National Front). Others, such as the Flemish nationalists in Vlaams Belang, suspect that Bannon is merely trying to create jobs for his friends, not least the Brexiteer Nigel Farage.

History does not augur well for Bannon’s efforts to divide and rule Europe on behalf of Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Comitati d’Azione per l’Universalità di Roma (CAUR), founded in 1933 to coordinate Europe’s fascist movements, collapsed just two years later. The CAUR ended up being boycotted both by the Nazis and by the Italian Fascists who created it.

Once Hitler had overtaken Mussolini as the world’s premier fascist, he no longer had an interest in anything other than acquiring clients and satraps. Moreover, he preferred to deal with “respectable” old elites such as Admiral Miklós Horthy of Hungary or Marshal Philippe Pétain of Vichy France.

In Europe today, the nationalist resurgence owes something to the proliferation of hysterical and inaccurate rhetoric comparing the EU to twentieth-century totalitarian regimes (a particular favorite of certain newspaper columnists who have blundered into politics). And, of course, the term “globalism” has become a serviceably sly synonym for Jews, just as “cosmopolitanism” was in the past.

But let’s not get hung up on the “F” word. Today’s Europe has not just emerged from a devastating world war that destroyed four empires; and today’s politics are not dominated by paramilitary armies of demobilized veterans and students. The biggest danger that we face is not a straightforward revival of fascism, but rather a creeping shift in traditional conservatism toward the extreme nationalist/populist right.

From a historical perspective, then, we would do better to focus less on the threat of fascism, and more on the degeneration of conservatism before and after World War I. That is when the traditional conservative right became infected by authoritarian and corporatist ideas, as well as a hatred of the left, Jews, and teeming cosmopolitan metropolises such as Berlin, Madrid, and Vienna. At the time, those cities were red spots of modernism in a green sea of agrarian provincialism.

A decade before WWI, the Dreyfus Affair had already offered a striking preview of the deep-seated hatreds that would be mobilized 30 years later. By the time fascism had arrived, so too had Bolshevism. And that was enough for the traditional conservatives to hold their noses and throw in with the fascists, even if they were sniffy about the latter’s shrill plebian tone. To understand what such an alliance might look like today, consider that Lord Pearson of the UK Independence Party recently hosted Yaxley-Lennon for lunch in the House of Lords.

This is not to say that conservativism and fascism are interchangeable concepts. In 1934, the Portuguese dictator António Salazar alluded to some important distinctions when he banned the National Syndicalist organization. Specifically, he objected to the group’s “exaltation of youth, the cult of force through so-called direct action, the principle of the superiority of the state political power in social life, the propensity for organizing masses behind a single leader.” Classical conservatives, after all, tend to favor demobilization and deference to authority and tradition, not mass-movement agitation in the streets.

Were he alive today, the great conservative thinker Eric Voegelin would cast a baleful eye over the conservatives who are now embracing “mobocracy,” just as he did in the case of interwar German elites. And he would have been particularly scornful of the AfD’s Beatrix von Storch, the Tory Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg, and other members of the upper class who claim to be tribunes of the ordinary folk in “flyover” country.

Likewise, Voegelin’s acidic contemporary Karl Kraus would have had much to say about the debasement of language by right-wing newspapers that now smear civil servants and judges as “saboteurs” and “enemies of the people.” And he would have skewered millionaire newspaper columnists who imagine that they know the mind of Everyman just because they call taxi drivers “mate.”

Liberal democracy is not experiencing an existential crisis. Though the political pendulum has been swinging toward “identity,” it will soon swing back toward “the economy” as we start to feel the full impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Fundamental questions about the future of work and wages will reassert themselves with a vengeance.

Furthermore, one gathers that the educated middle classes are growing tired of being hectored by the self-appointed upper-class spokespeople of provincial ignorance. This would certainly explain the massive pro-EU demonstrations in London this past October, as well as the recent electoral successes of the Greens in Germany.

It is time for liberals to stop twittering away about fascism and tyranny, and start exposing the con artists and hucksters who have captured our politics. The conversation we should be having would focus squarely on the decay of modern conservatism, the crisis of social democracy, and the dawning age of technological disruption.

Michael Burleigh is a historian and author. His books include Small Wars, Faraway Places: The Genesis of the Modern World, Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, The Third Reich: A New History, and The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: A History of Now.

Michael Burleigh is a historian and author. His books include Small Wars, Faraway Places: The Genesis of the Modern World, Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism, The Third Reich: A New History, and The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: A History of Now.

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